SOA Forum: Execs cite successes, challenges

San Jose, Calif. -- Motorola’s three-year-old campaign to build an SOA has yielded deployment of 180 services so far, and is expected to expand to 1,000 by early next year, a company official said at the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum here on Thursday.

The company anticipates that the number of services will ultimately top out at 1,500, said Toby Redshaw, Motorola corporate vice president for IT architecture, emerging technology, and e-business. He cited the competitive edge afforded by an SOA while also noting deployment issues.

“One-hundred-eighty doesn’t sound like a lot but that clearly puts us in the top 5 percent globally, maybe a little better than that,” Redshaw said. Motorola’s SOA, as would be expected, relies heavily on Web services.

“We think we’re in a competitively advantageous [position] because we’ve been playing this for three years,” Redshaw said. He also emphasized the benefits of “small agile” over “big slow” in business automation.

Brought into Motorola to turn around the company’s IT systems, SOA was to be the basis on which the company’s strategy relied. “Back then, we called it a service-based architecture,” Redshaw said.

“We believe this will let us add business services [at a] two- to three-times rate of speed,” Redshaw said. SOA also allows Motorola to do more with less, he added.

Citing the need for SOA, Redshaw said companies these days cannot afford to be less efficient with their computers than their competitors can. “Today, your company will get killed in four to five quarters,” he said.

“It sounds like a light beer commercial, but [an SOA is] faster, it’s cheaper, it’s better,” at providing a more coherent IT strategy, Redshaw said. Motorola also expects its IT suppliers to be supporting SOA.

Motorola’s SOA features business activity monitoring for Siebel and Oracle applications as well as a supply chain management system. Building an SOA allows IT staff to “drill down into the legacy spaghetti and harvest the gold,” by expressing legacy systems as Web services used in a component layer, Redshaw said.

Deploying an SOA, however, requires critical components such as a UDDI directory and Web services security, management, and governance, Redshaw said. Although UDDI has been considered disappointing in enabling provision of Internet-based Web services directories, Redshaw is a believer. “If you don’t have a good directory to go find these things in, it’s ‘game over.’ I don’t care how good the other parts are,” he said.

Web services security and management are important, given corporate priorities on security and the potential of destructive payloads in a Web services message, according to Redshaw. “[The] fastest path to get fired in IT today is a big security problem,” he said. A governance layer, meanwhile, enables optimization in an SOA, Redshaw explained.

An SOA allows for team-based development, building of business projects based on existing processes and reuse of components. It also lets IT staff deliver exactly what business teams asked for, according to Redshaw.

SOA has had its drawbacks, Redshaw acknowledged. Examples include immature standards in early years, security challenges of loosely coupled architectures and performance concerns caused by loose coupling of software components and bandwidth-intensive XML. “The security issues are not small. You need some serious pros on your team to address this,” Redshaw said.